Saturday, June 20, 2015

Andrew Durkin's book Decomposiion has been out for a bit and Wenatchee The Hatchet hopes to write about the book some in the upcoming weeks. There's some stuff that's interesting and persuasive about the book and there's some stuff that seems less persuasive and some stuff that's just weak sauce. It probably doesn't help matters that I started reading Durkin's book shortly before I also picked up Leonard Meyer's 1967 work Music, The Arts, and Ideas and one of these two books is a marvel of esoteric and abstract thought on practical matters and ... I'm afraid Durkin's book is not that book.

But Durkin's book could have been a fantastic polemic on the cultural crisis we have in which there is no public domain in pop culture. I just think he made a mistake of making his manifesto against "authenticity" and "authorship" about music when he should have made it about more that. Think less music than ... Episode VII.